August 28, 2005

Pandora is Launching, Right Now

Michael Arrington

9 comments »

Pandora just stopped playing music. I went to their site and saw this message:

We apologize for the inconvenience…

After a successful preview period, Pandora will be open to the public starting very soon. We’re updating our systems to support the full public version.

Please check back tomorrow… and enjoy the music!

By the time I wake up tomorrow I expect Pandora will be fully live.

We posted a profile of Pandora here, and wrote about their upcoming launch here. Glad to see them finally go live, sad to have to start paying. Robert Scoble continues to love Pandora too. They passed his “seven-day” test and he’s still using it. Steve Gillmor, you are going to lose that bet with Robert and me.

Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2005 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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WeBreakStuff

August 29th, 2005 at 2:05 pm

web2.0 track

August 29th, 2005 at 10:50 pm

TechCrunch » Web 2.0 This Week (Aug 28 - Sept 3)

December 25th, 2005 at 5:52 pm

Profile - Last.fm

August 9th, 2007 at 8:50 pm

Comments

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Tom Conrad

August 29th, 2005 at 2:54 am

Yep, we’re live. Enjoy!

http://www.pandora.com

Tom
CTO @ Pandora
Matt Burris

August 29th, 2005 at 5:59 am

At first I couldn’t grasp the significance of Pandora, even after reading your profile, but after trying it out just now, I’m ecstatic!

This is truly revolutionary and well worth the subscription fee. I’m going to go couch fishing, beg, borrow, steal, and scrounge up for a year’s subscription. This is too good to pass up.

To the makers of Pandora, good job! I always say that as music lovers, we live in a good time, and Pandora looks to enhance it a lot further.
Gideon Marken

August 29th, 2005 at 10:59 am

Michael/Kieth - you two may want to look at http://www.Last.fm/ - the foundation of song recommendations is built from a much larger, and much more interesting data pool.

I just started looking at Pandora today, and right away I can feel that this isn’t right for me. I’m sure it’s great for some - but this interface…

You’ll also find that Last.fm, provides a tracking service which tracks what ‘you’ listen to from your player. Granted, not everyone wants or needs charts of their listening habits, but once you start using the service, you find checking your stats to be fun. This is also where the data comes from for their suggestions.

Once you grasp what is going on behind the scenes to produce such stats and discover all the connections between users, songs and stations - you’ll be nodding your head saying, “this is insane.”

No - I don’t work there I just think what they are doing is cool, and felt they offer a similar to Pandora. Anyone considering Pandora may want to also look over Last.fm.

You two should consider them for a profile too. Keep up the great work - I’m enjoying your blog.
Mike

August 30th, 2005 at 8:02 pm

Actually, Pandora is a lot different than Last.fm. You see, Last.fm works on collaborative filtering whereby their system recommends artists based on the artists that other people listen to. Pandora’s musicologists analyze every single song manually based on 400 musical characteristics. So, with Pandora you can build stations or playlists that are more customized and you’re more likely to find exact song-level matches to the music you like. Just because two artists have similarity doesn’t mean that you’ll like every song by both artists. Pandora understands why you like a specific song and it recommends additional songs that you’ll also like based on the characteristics of the music. Take my word for it. They are different. And no, I’m not a Pandora employee, friend or investor.
SimonH

August 31st, 2006 at 8:58 am

Wow, what a difference a year makes! There is still a lot of debate on the ‘Pandora vs. Last.fm’ topic but for me Pandora wins hands down. Lets just see if they embrace keyword tagging on artists/songs.